Culture of Murder, Culture of
Complicity: Anti-Semitism and the Origins of the Holocaust

INTRODUCTION

Fifty years after
the liberation of Auschwitz, some of the most disturbing questions about the
Nazi genocide remain unanswered. To what extent were ordinary Germans willing
participants in mass murder? How are we to explain the behavior of the
perpetrators? To what extent was the German public aware of the extermination
of the European Jews? Everyone who teaches German history encounters these
questions from students. The factual record is not in doubt but the historical
and moral implications remain ambiguous.

These questions are
of more than mere academic interest. "If there is any single lesson to be
drawn. . .from the Holocaust," writes the historian Omer Bartov, "it is that
precisely our own society [and] our mass and individual psychology contain the
potential for another such genocide."[i]
It would be comforting if we could assign the Holocaust to the historical past
and tell ourselves that the worst is over. However the recent "ethnic
cleansing," in Bosnia and the tribal slaughter in Rwanda, remind us that our
world is not immune to outbreaks of mass murder.

The criminal
enormity of the plan still stuns us. The Nazi State undertook to kill every
man, woman, and child of the Jewish people in pursuit of an ideological
fantasy. To carry out such a project of genocide, two groups of people were
necessary: a criminal political elite dominating the German state, and a much
larger group of "ordinary men" willing to become the perpetrators of mass
murder. Much of the scholarship on the Holocaust for the last fifty years has
focused upon the first group. There is no shortage of scholarly biographies of
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and the other
members of the Nazi ruling circle. With a few exceptions, such as the precise
date for the order to begin the "Final Solution," there is also a scholarly
consensus about the development of Nazi policies from persecution to
deportation, and finally extermination.

However the actual
murderers have received little scholarly attention; or, to put it more
precisely, the foot soldiers of the Holocaust have received little attention.
Studies of the SS or the Gestapo abound, but, "One expected them to
behave as they did: that is what they were for."[ii]

Ultimately the
Holocaust occurred because the regime was successful in organizing large numbers
of people willing to carry out murder. "Sometimes they operated in the field,
at the scene of death," writes Raul Hilberg, "as in the case of the Order Police
engaged in shootings, or railway men driving the trains filled with Jews into
camp enclosures. Whether they were in command or lowly placed, in an office or
outdoors, they all did their part, when the time came, with all the efficiency
they could muster."[iii]
Furthermore, Hilberg, the dean of Holocaust historians, has estimated that 25%
of all the victims died by shooting. More than 50% perished in the six major
extermination camps equipped with gas chambers (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor,
Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno) and the remainder died of starvation in the
ghettos, or of overwork and general brutality in labor camps and death marches.[iv]
The locus of genocide was Poland.

RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101

Recently the entire
direction of Holocaust studies has been revolutionized by the publication of
two books that focus on one group of perpetrators: Christopher Browning's
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York, 1992) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). As the titles
indicate, both books focus on the "ordinary" Germans who carried out the
regime's murderous policies; in fact, both books draw upon the same body of
evidence -- the judicial interrogations of 210 members of Reserve Police
Battalion 101. Working from the same data, Browning and Goldhagen reached
radically differing conclusions motivation of this group of German policemen.

It is the problem
of explaining the willingness of these "ordinary men" to engage in extraordinary
acts of brutality that has dominated the field of Holocaust studies in the last
several years. The so-called German "Order Police" consisted of middle age men,
unfit for the army, but nevertheless pressed into military service during the
early days of The Second World War. Organized roughly like the United States
National Guard, the German Order Police was recruited on a regional
basis--Police Battalion 101 came from the city of Hamburg--and assigned to
occupation duties in Poland as the Wehrmacht moved eastwards into the
Soviet Union. That the members of the unit were mass murderers is beyond
dispute. The members of the unit, about 500 men in all, participated in the
shooting of approximately 38,000 Jews and deported a further 45,000 Jews to the
Treblinka extermination camp between the summer of 1942 and the fall of 1943.[v]

The justice process
worked very slowly in the case of Police Battalion 101. Some members of the
unit were killed during the war but most survived to return to Hamburg. Major
Trapp, the commander of the unit, along with one lieutenant and two enlisted men
were extradited to Poland in October of 1947. The Polish authorities charged
the four men with the murder of 78 Polish civilians. The indictment did not
mention any crimes against the Jewish population. After a one day trial, Trapp
and one policeman were executed and the other two defendants were sentenced to
prison. Most of the men simply returned to their old jobs. Twelve members of
the unit joined the Hamburg police. There was no further investigation until
1962 when the State prosecutor of Hamburg began looking into the case. In the
next five years 210 members of the unit were interrogated. In 1968 fourteen
members of the unit were found guilty of war crimes and given prison sentences
ranging from five to eight years. After a lengthy appeals process, most of the
men received suspended sentences. Ultimately, only three men served time in
prison.[vi]
It is ironic that the investigation of Police Battalion 101 was arguably one of
the few successful cases brought to trial in West Germany. "It is to be hoped
that the admirable efforts of the prosecution in preparing this case," writes
Christopher Browning, "will serve history better than they have served justice."[vii]

The men of Police
Battalion 101 were initiated into their careers as genocidal murderers on July
13,1942. Arriving from Hamburg, the unit received orders to clear the village
of Jozefow of approximately 1,800 Jews.[viii]
The Battalion was ordered to select out the young men for labor and shoot the
rest of the population--about 1,500 men, women, and children. Major Trapp was
obviously shaken by the order. He asked the battalion medical officer: "My
God, why must I do this?" The unit arrived in Jozefow before dawn, and Papa
Trapp (as the men called him), gave a brief speech. His voice choked with
tears, he fought to control himself as he told the men that they had orders to
perform a very unpleasant task. Major Trapp then made the men an extraordinary
offer: if any of the policemen did not feel up to the task that lay before
them, they could be excused. After some hesitation, ten or twelve men stepped
forward. They turned in their rifles and were assigned other jobs. His driver
remembered Trapp saying, "If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then
God have mercy on us Germans."[ix]

The men assigned
to shoot the Jews gathered in a circle around the battalion surgeon to receive
instructions as to the best place to aim. One policeman recalled that "Dr.
Schoenfelder sketched on the ground the upper part of a human body and marked on
the neck the spot at which we should fire."

The Jews of Jozefow
were taken into the forest in groups of twenty and executed by a bullet to the
neck or head. Those soldiers tasked with the actual shooting found the
experience difficult. Shooting people at close range, in the words of Sergeant
Bentheim, meant that "The executioners were gruesomely soiled with blood, brain
matter, and bone splinters. It stuck to their clothes." The thirty men of
Lieutenant Kurt Drucker's platoon shot three hundred Jews in three hours. In
all, Police Battalion 101 shot approximately 1,500 Jews that afternoon. A
fairly significant portion of the unit--according to Christopher Browning, 10 to
15% -- either did not shoot at all, or started shooting but could not continue.

Franz Kastenbaum*
volunteered the following account to the Hamburg prosecutor:

The killing
continued throughout the afternoon and evening. The bodies of the victims were
left unburied. The shooters returned from the woods about 9:00 PM. The
marketplace was now empty except for the piles of luggage which details of
soldiers burned. Before the men finished this task, a bloodied ten year old
girl wandered in from the woods with a head wound. She was brought to Major
Trapp who took her in his arms and announced, "You shall remain alive."[xi]
One instant of pity neither excuses or absolves Major Trapp who was deservedly
executed by the Polish authorities.

The men climbed
into their trucks and returned to their barracks. An extra ration of alcohol
was issued. The men spoke little, ate almost nothing, but drank a great deal.[xii]
That night one policeman awoke from a nightmare firing his pistol into the
ceiling of the barracks.

The men of Police
Battalion 101 do not fit easily into any model of genocidal executioners current
in Holocaust studies. These were not the fervent young products of Nazi
indoctrination, nor were they the "desk murderers" portrayed in Hannah Arendt's
classic study of Adolf Eichmann.[xiii]
The massacre at Jozefow also illustrates a point worth reiteration: "the
Holocaust was more than a bureaucratic operation; it was not the work of so many
banal cogs in the wheels of evil."[xiv]
Perpetrator encountered victim at close range. The officers and NCOs were men
approaching middle age. Of the 33 NCOs in the unit, 22 were Nazi party members.
The average age of the men was 39. Virtually none had any education beyond
leaving Volkschule at age 14. Over 60% of the men were unskilled
laborers: dock workers, truck drivers, and construction workers.

Most came from
Hamburg, a cosmopolitan port city with a long tradition of socialist politics
and intermarriage between the Jewish and Christian population. If Munich was
the most Nazi city in Germany, Hamburg was arguably the least Nazi city. In
short, the social breakdown of this unit did not seem to offer a promising group
from which to recruit mass murderers. Yet 80 to 90% of these men became
efficient professional killers. How are we to explain this chilling
transformation?

ANTI-SEMITISM: CULTURE OF MASS MURDER?

Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen has been the most forceful spokesperson for the idea that "the
central causal agent of the Holocaust" was the German people's racist hatred
of Jews:

We readily accept
that. . .the Aztecs believed human sac-

rifices were necessary for the sun to rise. .
.so why can

we not believe that many Germans in the
twentieth

century subscribed to beliefs that appear to us
to be

palpably absurd. . .anti-Semitism, was the
common structure of the perpetrator's cognition The German
perpetrators were . . . men and women who, true to their own anti-Semitic

Erwin Grafmann*,
according to Goldhagen "the most forthcoming and honest of all the men in Police
Battalion 101," discussed his memories of Jozefow with the state prosecutor
during the 1960s. When he was asked why he did not accept the offer from Major
Trapp to excuse himself from the actual shooting, he responded that, "at the
time, we did not give it any second thoughts at all."[xvi]
During his trial Grafmann was asked if he thought the killings were immoral. He
answered that, "Only in later years did one actually become fully cognizant of
what had taken place at that time. . .[it was only afterwards that the thought
first] occurred to me that it [the killing] was not right."[xvii]
Others put the matter more bluntly: "The Jew was not acknowledged by us to be a
human being."[xviii]
Goldhagen concludes that men like Grafmann, "By choosing not excuse themselves
from the genocide of the Jews. . .indicated that they wanted to be genocidal
executioners."[xix]

It is hardly
necessary to point out that Goldhagen's thesis is not new. Goldhagen simply
restates the old idea that a clear line of anti-Semitic thought runs from Martin
Luther to Adolf Hitler. He believes that this peculiar German intellectual
tradition was largely responsible for the triumph of Nazism. In all
probability, Goldhagen's ideas also sum up the common image of the Nazi genocide
for most Americans of the "Baby Boom" generation and their parents today. "Put
Bluntly," Fritz Stern writes, "For Goldhagen, as for the National Socialists,
Hitler was Germany." [xx]As for the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, given the chance to excuse
themselves from murder, the great majority killed with "gusto"[xxi];
they had "fun'[xxii];
they "killed for pleasure."[xxiii]

Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's approach raises as many questions as it answers. If German
anti-Semitism was the root cause of the Holocaust, as Goldhagen contends, how
are we to explain the enthusiastic participation of thousands of non-German SS
volunteers? If, as many scholars have argued, French anti-Semitism was more
pervasive before 1914 than German, why was the French defense of Jews more
vigorous than similar efforts in Germany? As a causal model for the Holocaust,
"eliminationist anti-Semitism" explains everything and nothing.

If Nazi Germany was
merely the culmination of the psychopathic and murderous German mind-set, how
are we to account for the disappearance of that mind-set in the last few
decades? Today, Goldhagen describes Germans as "committed democrats" and
concludes that the German's "absurd beliefs. . . .rapidly dissipated after the
Second World War."[xxiv]
If, as Goldhagen contends, anti-Semitism was the "common cognitive structure. .
.of German society," why should military defeat and occupation change that
mindset so thoroughly?

In a sense,
Goldhagen's book is the latest chapter in an old argument between those who see
the Holocaust as a crime against the Jewish people and those who see it as a
crime against humanity. Other scholars, most notably Hannah Arendt, have
ascribed the Holocaust to the larger phenomenon of Totalitarianism. Arendt
argued that "only the choice of the victims, not the nature of the crime could
be derived from the long history of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism."[xxv]

"ORDINARY MEN:" CONFORMITY AND MURDER

There is another
possible explanation for the behavior of the men of Reserve Police Battalion
101. One of the characteristics of twentieth century history has been the
capacity of government to exploit the tragic conformity of ordinary men to
unleash violence as state policy. Perhaps the most chilling lesson to be
deduced from the massacre at Jozefow is that "ordinary men" can be conditioned
to become genocidal executioners.

Many of the
policemen who refused to shoot in the woods outside Jozefow overcame their
initial moral reservations (according to Browning) and/or squeamishness
(according to Goldhagen) and later volunteered for firing squads. In short, the
Holocaust acquired a twisted sort of grass-roots momentum, as perpetrators
became true believers in what they were ordered to do. Christopher
Browning examined the post-war testimony of Police Battalion 101 and found
evidence that some policemen, like Erwin Grafmann, killed because they shared
the ideology of the regime; but for a great number of the killers, the decision
to commit murder was simply the least painful option open in the situation. The
massacre at Jozefow is interesting precisely because the commanding officer gave
the men the opportunity to excuse themselves. "Yet 80 to 90% of the men
proceeded to kill," writes Browning,. . . To break ranks and step out, to adopt
overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was
easier for them to shoot."[xxvii]

Many of the men
no doubt harbored anti-Semitic attitudes. Certainly Nazi racial propaganda
played a role, but Browning discovered that the men of Reserve Police Battalion
101 cited other factors including: the fear of breaking ranks, revealing
unmanly "weakness" by refusing to shoot helpless victims, and even concerns over
career advancement. Sergeant Bentheim* advised those who could not or would not
carry out the orders to shoot to "slink away" to the marketplace and watch the
trucks. One member of the battalion who refused to shoot remembered the
response of his comrades returning from the murder site: "They showered me with
remarks such as 'shithead' and 'weakling' to express their disgust."[xxviii]

Those who refused to shoot
argued not that they were "too good" but rather that they were "too weak" to
kill. In this way they salved their consciences without challenging the dominant
macho values of their comrades.[xxix]

None of Browning's
arguments excuses or even extenuates the murders of Reserve Police Battalion
101. It would be comforting if we could ascribe the Holocaust to racist
monsters, to men with no more in common with us than the Aztecs as Goldhagen
would have it,

but the evidence leads us
toward another conclusion. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were indeed
ordinary men. "It strikes me as more likely that Hitler's executioners came in
all sorts and conditions,psychopaths and conformists, fanatics and opportunists,
adventurers and moral cowards."[xxx]

Half a century
after Reserve Police Battalion 101 destroyed the Jewish community of Jozefow,
the historian cannot but wonder if the conditions that produced that massacre
could occur again. Christopher Browning concludes that the collective behavior
of Police Battalion 101 has disturbing implications for the future:

Did the vast
majority of Germans support Hitler and the Nazis? Was Hitler's anti-Semitism
central to his political appeal? If electoral statistics are any indication, it
is difficult to make the case, as Goldhagen would have it, that Nazi
anti-Semitism, "in a more. . .elaborated and violent form--mirrored the
sentiments of German culture." In the last free election of 1932, some 67% of
Germans voted against Hitler although it is certainly possible that some of
those who voted anti-Nazi disliked Jews. "It is generally accepted," writes
Fritz Stern, "that the more the Nazis tried to widen their appeal, the more they
muted their anti-Semitic theme."[xxxii]

On the other hand
the German public and the German elites, with a few notable exceptions, met the
increasing state persecution of Jews with silence. One ought to remember as
well that active protest against anti-Semitic policies in the Spring of 1933
would not necessarily have resulted in arrest. "The price for the exercise of
decency rose only when the regime became stronger."[xxxiii]
Commenting on the lack of civil courage among the Germans in a letter to Arnold
Zweig dated September 29,1935, Sigmund Freud wrote "We did not want to believe
it at the time, but it was true what the others said about the Germans. [Krauts]"[xxxiv]

However, after
1941, as expectations of victory declined and as news of German defeats became
as common as the Allied bombs raining down on their cities, Germans became
increasingly indifferent to the regime's treatment of the Jews. But even as
late as September, 1941, when the government issued a decree forcing Jews to
wear the yellow star, some Germans reacted with acts of public kindness
"offering Jews cigars or cigarettes, giving children sweets, or standing up for
Jews on trams or underground trains."[xxxv]
Shocked by public dissent, even on a small scale, the regime responded by
intensifying anti-Jewish propaganda and enacting a new law punishing any public
displays of sympathy for Jews with a three month term of imprisonment behind the
barbed wire of a concentration camp.[xxxvi]

In response to the
common assertion that individual Germans still had the moral responsibility of
resisting the government, one should remember that the Third Reich was not a
benign dictatorship. Gestapo records indicate that "between 1933 and
1945 about three million Germans were held at some stage in a concentration camp
for political reasons, some only for a few weeks, but some for the whole twelve
years; of these approximately 800,000 were held for active resistance."[xxxvii]The University of Munich students who distributed anti-government pamphlets
under the name the White Rose were beheaded.

The general
consensus in the United States for the last fifty years has been that ordinary
Germans must have known about the genocide. How was it possible that the
extermination of millions of human beings could have been carried out in the
heart of Europe without anyone's knowledge? The answer to this question is
neither obvious nor reassuring. The regime carried out the Final Solution
under conditions of wartime secrecy and all public discussion or criticism of
anti-Jewish policy would have been monitored by the network of Gestapo
informers. Furthermore, the Nazi state employed cynical euphemisms to disguise
their real activities: "Final Solution" instead of extermination, "transfer"
rather than deportation, and "special treatment" in place of killing by gas.
Nevertheless the evidence "leads to the conclusion that large sections of the
German population, both Jews and non-Jews, either knew or suspected what was
happening in Poland and Russia."[xxxviii]

After all, it was
simply impossible to hide the existence of the great network of concentration
camps spreading across Germany and occupied Europe. The existence of the death
camps was treated as a state secret, but any German citizen living in a large
city would have been aware of the police round-ups and deportations of German
Jews to the east for "resettlement" It is just possible however that Germans
living in small villages not adjacent to a major rail line might have been
ignorant of the deportations. But in the words of Eugen Kogon, a former
prisoner at Buchenwald and later Professor of Political Science at the
University of Munich: "Not a single German could have been unaware of the fact
that the prisons were full to overflowing, and that executions were taking place
continually all over the country."[xxxix]

Thousands of German
military personnel would have witnessed operations like that of Reserve Police
Battalion 101 at Jozefow. It is also true that Axis allies such as Italians,
Hungarians and Romanian troops would have known about the mass shootings. The
Gestapo reports indicate that the regime was aware of this problem. One
party report dated October 9, 1942 noted:

the population in various parts of Germany has
recently begun to discuss the 'very harsh measures' against the
Jews. . .in the eastern territories. . . these discussions. . .stem
from stories told by soldiers on leave from units fighting in the
east, who themselves had been able to witness such measures.[xl]

In October 1942, a wounded
medical orderly named Hans Scholl returned from Russia to Munich and wrote a
series of anti-Nazi pamphlets under the title the White Rose. One White Rose
leaflet stated that "since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews
have been murdered. . .in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful
crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of
history."[xli]

Rumors about the
use of poison gas on Jewish inmates were current, although the details were
often erroneous. A defecting member of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra,
questioned in Lisbon, reported that "Deportations to Poland and Russia were
equivalent to a death sentence, for Jews were being gassed there."[xlii]
There is also some indication that, despite the efforts of the authorities to
hermetically seal the extermination camp at Auschwitz, people were hearing
rumors. Railway workers reported that passengers on trains passing through
Auschwitz stood up to get a better view.[xliii]
On the other hand, neither Elie Wiesel nor Primo Levi had heard about the
existence or the nature of Auschwitz before their arrival. Wiesel, in
particular has often argued that an effort by the Allies to drop leaflets among
the Hungarian Jews telling them of the true nature of Nazi "resettlement" might
have saved thousands of lives. David Bankier concludes, "what became known as
the Holocaust was an inconceivable and therefore unbelievable reality even for
those anti-Nazis who deliberately sought information."[xliv]

Despite all the
rumors, concludes Primo Levi, most Germans could claim a degree of ignorance:

the methodical industrialized extermination on
a scale of millions, the gas chambers, the cremation furnaces, the
vile despoiling of corpses, all this was not supposed to be known,
and in effect few did know it up to the end of the war.[xlv]

However, that is not the final
word on the question of German knowledge. "In Hitler's Germany, a particular
code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did
not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. In this
way, the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance."[xlvi]

Millions of Germans
knew that their Jewish neighbors had disappeared; many suspected that their fate
was unpleasant. Those who gave the matter much thought at all under the
conditions of bombing raids and anxiety about relatives serving in the armed
forces thought in terms of persecution rather than extermination.

"Most individuals faced a great
many more important problems," wrote Walter Laquer, "It was an unpleasant
topic, speculations were unprofitable, discussions of the fate of the Jews were
discouraged. Consideration of this question was pushed aside, blotted out for
the duration."[xlvii]

CONFORMITY, INDIFFERENCE, MORAL COWARDICE

"The road to
Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference," Ian Kershaw wrote
recently, "Very many, probably most Germans were opposed to the Jews. . .,
welcomed their exclusion from economy and society, saw them as natural outsiders
to the German 'National Community', a dangerous minority against whom it was
legitimate to discriminate."[xlviii]
Beyond this, it is impossible for the historian to argue based upon the evidence
of popular opinion. Alfons Heck, a leading memoirist and historian of the
Hitler Youth, commented in a recent letter that, "I'm forced to agree with
Goldhagen that there was widespread anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, but it
surely isn't a sufficient explanation for the Holocaust." It is notoriously
difficult for the historian to indicate the influence of abstract ideas on
popular attitudes in any historical period and that difficulty applies to the
concept of anti-Semitism. Historians can, however, use the historical record to
demonstrate how people acted.

The diaries of
Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor married to a Christian, record both the
callousness and decency of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich. In December,
1938, Klemperer, noted that a policeman who had often been friendly in the past,
walked by him "looking fixedly ahead, as distant as could be. In his behavior,
the man probably represents 79 million Germans."[xlix]Only 1% of court cases
for dissent dealt with citizens making pro-Jewish remarks.[l]

Most Germans found
ways to resist the "temptation" of goodness. "The majority of Germans accepted
the steps taken by the regime," writes Saul Friedländer, "and looked the other
way."[li]Nazi Germany was a culture of complicity rather than a culture of
"demonological anti-Semitism." "Apathy and 'moral indifference' to the treatment
and fate of the Jews was the most widespread attitude of all. This was not a
neutral stance. It was a deliberate turning away from any personal
responsibility [and] acceptance of the state's right to decide on an issue of
little personal concern to most Germans."[lii]

CONCLUSION

The ghost of Hitler
still haunts the Germans and their neighbors. The power of that shadow was
illustrated in 1985 when an American president's ill-considered remarks caused
an international sensation. President Ronald Reagan planned to mark the
fortieth anniversary of Germany's surrender in the Second World War by joining
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a visit to the small Southern German town
of Bitburg to lay a wreath at the local military cemetery.

What should have been a
ceremonial statement of NATO solidarity, became an intense political
embarrassment to the Reagan administration when it was revealed that the Bitburg
cemetery contained the graves of numerous SS. President Reagan threw gasoline
on the fire by declaring that "those young men are victims of Nazism also. . .
.They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."[liii]
When critics suggested that the Bitburg visit ought to be balanced by a visit to
a concentration camp, Reagan refused saying, [The Germans] "have a guilt feeling
that's been imposed on them, and I just think it's unnecessary. . . .I feel very
strongly that instead of re-awakening the memories. . . .we should observe this
day as the day when, forty years ago, peace began." The President stunned the
world Jewish community by relativizing the line between perpetrator and victim.

President Reagan
paid a political price for his loyalty to Chancellor Kohl. A French newspaper
gave him an "F in history" and the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acidly
commented that "he fought the war on the film lots of Hollywood. . .and
apparently got many of his ideas of what happened from subsequent study of the
Reader's Digest."[liv]Only in the face of an impassioned plea from Nobel Peace Prize winner
and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel ("That place, Mr. President, in not your
place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.") did President Reagan agree
to visit Bergen-Belsen as well as lay the wreath at Bitburg.

If nothing else,
the Bitburg fiasco indicates the dangers of fuzzy historical thinking. The
historian has really only one duty: to tell the truth about both the living and
the dead. The Nazi Holocaust of fifty years ago still looms over our world and
we would be wise to remember the victims and the perpetrators and learn from the
range of choices that both faced. How should the ordinary German of
today--especially the majority of the population born after 1945--view the
Holocaust? In the words of Elie Wiesel, "I don't believe in collective guilt,
therefore there's no collective innocence or collective pardon. . . .Only the
guilty can ask for forgiveness." Ultimately, all responsibility is individual.
That is not to say that we should relativize or forget the Nazi genocide. On
the contrary, this generation, and every succeeding generation of Germans must
confront--openly and honestly--the Nazi past.

[v]Christopher
Browning. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 1992). See the appendix, pp.
191-92 for a specific breakdown of the unit's participation in
deportations,shootings, and "Jew Hunts."

[viii]See
Christopher Browning. "One Day In Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder."
Nazism And German Society. Edited by David F. Crew (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 300-315. I have depended upon this version of
Browning's study to reconstruct the massacre at Jozefow. Browning admitted
that "different historians reading the same set of interrogations would not
produce or agree upon an identical set of 'facts' --beyong an elementary
minimum--out of which a narrative of events. . .could be created."

[xxiii]Ibid.,
p. 451. Once again I have chosen to highlight the same words in this
sentence selected by Christopher Browning in his response to Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen at the recent U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum syposium on Germany
and the Holocaust held on 4/8/96. For a full reference, see n. 17.

[xxv]Arendt's
controversial views on anti-Semitism can be found in Hannah Arendt. The
Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958). For her famous
meditation upon the Adolf Eichmann trial and the "banality of evil," see
Hanna Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1963).

[xxvi]Amos
Elon. "The Case of Hannah Arendt." The New York Review of Books,
(Volume XLIV, Number 17) November 6, 1997, p. 26.

[xxx]Pulzer,
"Psychopaths and Conformists," p. 21. Pulzer, a noted historian of
political anti-Semitism, thus disagrees with his colleagues about the link
between anti-Semitism--"eliminationist," "redemptive," or
"revolutionary"--and the actual process of mass murder. In this, it is
probably fair to say, Pulzer represents the view of a majority of German
political historians.

[xxxvi]David
Bankier. The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under
Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 124-30. Bankier's book has been
a vital source for anyone studying the German popular response to the Final
Solution.